Cribb, a geology professor at MTSU, saw the spill as a chance for two of his undergraduate students to do some real-life research.

“I’m a big proponent of undergraduate research,” Cribb said, explaining the chance to do research as undergraduates can open doors to jobs and postgraduate programs for MTSU alums.

Cribb applied for a National Science Foundation grant to study the impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-fired power plants on the surrounding environment.

The Summer Research grant request was approved and Cribb will receive NSF funds through the STEPmt program, which stands for STEPping up Undergraduate Research at Middle Tennessee.

In 2005, the NSF awarded $1.7 million to STEPmt, which the university used to increase undergraduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Cribb’s funding comes through the College of Basic and Applied Sciences.

The Summer Research award granted Cribb the funds for research conducted by an MTSU professor, two MTSU students, one high school teacher and one high school student.

Cribb will supervise MTSU students Jennifer Pickering and Caitlin Shannon in the research, as well as Ravenwood High School chemistry teacher, and MTSU alum, Scott Crombie and a yet to be named Rutherford County high school student.

“This gets them into research and its fantastic experience to get these kids into grad school,” Cribb said.

Heavy Metals

On Dec. 22, a pile of coal ash sludge broke its bounds on the banks of the Emory River at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant. The spill covered 300 acres of land in Roane County, damaging nine homes and destroying three others.

“Immediately downstream of the Kingston coal ash spill, the Emory River feeds into the Clinch River, which in turn feeds into the Tennessee River,” he said, meaning the spilled ash and its toxic heavy metals have the ability to travel quite a distance from the power plant.

“All three rivers are public waterways. … People may come into direct contact and ingest the ash in water, or in riverside sediments where ash collects as waves wash it toward the shoreline,” Cribb said.

The power plant, 40 miles west of Knoxville, was opened in 1955. Most of the ash produced in the time since opening the plant was stored on site.

“A small amount of coal ash may be sold as supplementary material for the manufacture of concrete and asphalt, but most is disposed of in the surface impoundments at the plant,” Cribb said.

A week after the spill, Cribb visited the site along with Crombie and Shannon.

“It looks just like a small version of the Mount St. Helens mudslide,” he said, referring to the volcano in Washington State that erupted in 1980.

The team of researchers took samples of river water and mud upstream, downstream and directly from the ash spill. Cribb said the samples from the spill site and downstream showed high levels of arsenic, lead and cadmium, all potentially harmful toxic metals.

“We did find elevated levels of arsenic in sediments in an access to the water for the public. It appeared to us the ash in the sediment had been collecting for more than a week, but there’s no real way to know for sure,” he said.

After the preliminary investigation at the Kingston site, Cribb wondered if similar TVA coal-fired power plants are having a similar effect on the environment.

So he applied for the STEPmt grant to sample six other TVA power plants – in Allen, Gallatin, Johnsonville, Kingston, Paradise and Widows Creek – that also store coal ash on site to see what is in the river and mud.

“We want to know what’s there, how did it get there, where did it come from and when the material travels through the water, how does it change and what makes it change,” Cribb said.

Cribb and his students will collect samples from various distances from the plants to see how far the pollution can travel downstream. They will then compare the data with samples from a coal-fired power plant that does not store ash on site.

The team will use data collected by MTSU geology students, who have been studying the environmental effects of mining waste in the East Tennessee’s Copper Basin, as a basis for understanding, he said.

“Certain elements will decrease in concentration downstream away from the source much more rapidly than others,” he said, explaining the students found the concentration of heavy metals decreases very rapidly about 3 kilometers or 1.9 miles from the polluted mining site.

Cribb said the research could help in clean-up efforts in the future by determining just how far pollution will travel downstream from the spill site and from the mountains of ash piled at TVA power plants. It could also be used to see if “clean coal” technology is, in fact, safe for the environment.

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.